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Writing the Grace of Life: a Brief Reflection on St. Augustine's

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Writing the Grace of Life: a Brief Reflection on St. Augustine's TTJ 12.1 (2009): 40-57 ISSN 1598-7140 Writing the Grace of Life: A Brief Reflection on St. Augustine’s Confessions* Miyon Chung Torch Trinity Graduate School of Theology, Korea St. Augustine’s Confessions was written ca. 397–400, shortly after Augustine was consecrated as bishop and made assistant to Valerius, the Bishop of Hippo. Even though the Confessions is an ancient work, it is still prodigiously engaged as “a storehouse of thought for the philosopher and the theologian, and for others as well.”1 In addition to its thought- provoking content, Peter Brown attributes the enduring “appeal” of the Confessions to its striking affective quality, specifically, to the fact that Augustine, “in his middle-age had dared to open himself up to the feel- ings of his youth.”2 Moreover, the title and the discursive methods of this celebrated text has also been influential in Western literary works.3 In fact, the Confessions has been heralded as the first of a new autobio- graphical genre, a textual prayer with emphasis on oral performance, a * This paper is based on my dissertation, “The Textuality of Grace in St. Augustine’s Confessions: A Ricoeurian Analysis,” (PhD diss., Southwestern Bap- tist Theological Seminary, 2003). 1. John K. Ryan, “Introduction,” in Confessions (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 17. This paper uses Ryan’s translation of the Confessions. See also Lang- don Gilkey, “Ordering the Soul: Augustine’s Manifold Legacy,” The Christian Century 105 (April 27, 1988): 426. 2. Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 170. Consider, for example, how Augustine’s vulnerability is made transparent in his recounting of bidding farewell to his son’s mother in Augustine, Confessions, 6.15.25. 3. Ryan, “Introduction,” 33-35; Robert J. O’Connell, Art and the Chris- tian Intelligence in St. Augustine (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 91-129. See Robert A. Herrrea’s “Augustine: Spiritual Centaur?” in Collectanea Augustiniana: Augustine: Mystic and Mystagogue, ed. Frederick Van Fleteren, Joseph C. Schnaubelt, and Joseph Reino (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 159-161 for a brief summary of the works that have been shaped by the Confessions. The Grace of Life in Augustine’s Confessions 41 confessional literature, a paradigm of narrative theology, and a didactic discourse conveyed in a narrative form.4 Most significantly for this paper, the Confessions illustrates a “vivid portrayal of a man in the presence of God, of God and the self intimately related but still separated by sin, and of a struggle for mastery within the self longing for final peace” in the mode of a sustained textual prayer.5 The thesis of this paper is that the contents, plot, and styles employed in Augustine’s Confessions manifest that its aim was not to introduce Augustine’s life as such. Rather, by unveiling his personal struggles with spirituality in the Confessions, Augustine has depicted a “dramatic theme” of life; and by “means of his extraordinary spiritual fortitude,” he has carved out an enduring paradigm of the Christian life.6 Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine briefly the background of the Confessions to delineate how Augustine’s text can perform as a model that unpacks and elucidates the grace of life. The Occasion for the Confessions The etymology of Augustine’s Latin title (confession), confiteri, means “to agree” or “to acknowledge.”7 The Latin word confessio comes from the Greek word o9mologei=n, which was used on religious, philosophical, and legal levels to convey a general sense of “to agree with,” “to agree to,” 4. The citations given below follow the order of genres given in the text. For autobiography, see Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princ- eton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 307; Georg Misch, A History of Autobi- ography in Antiquity, trans. E. W. Dickes, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), 1:17 and 2:633. For prayer, see Robert, McMahon, Augustine’s Prayerful Ascent: An Essay on the Literary Form of the “Confessions” (Athens: Uni- versity of Georgia Press, 1986), xi-xxii. For confessional literature, see Shirley J. Paolini, Confessions of Sin and Love in the Middle Ages: Dante’s “Commedia” and St. Augustine’s “Confessions.” (Washington: University Press of America, 1982), 4-5. For narrative theology, see Christopher J. Thompson, Christian Doctrine, Chris- tian Identity: Augustine and the Narrative Character (New York: University Press of America, 1999), 71-96. For didactic discourse, see John J. O’Meara, “Augustine’s Confessions: Elements of Fiction,” in Augustine: From Rhetor to Theologian Joanne McWilliam, ed. (Waterloo: Willfrid Laurier University Press, 1992), 77-95. 5. James J. O’Donnell, Augustine (Boston: Twayne, 1985), 81. 6. Karl Joachim Weintraub, The Value of the Individual/Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 21; Brown, Au- gustine, 162-8. 7. James Scott, “From Literal Self-Sacrifice to Literary Self-Sacrifice: Au- gustine’s Confessions and the Rhetoric of Testimony,” in Augustine: From Rhetor to Theologian Joanne McWilliam, ed. (Waterloo: Willfrid Laurier University Press, 1992), 35; James J. O’Donnell, Augustine, Confessions: Commentary of Books 8-13, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 3-7. 42 Torch Trinity Journal 12 (2009) or “to make a confession of guilt.”8 Hence, embedded in the meaning of confession is the sense that the source of confessing is not in the confes- sor but in another being. Confession also carries the meaning of “accus- ing” oneself before God as well as rendering praises to a divine being.9 In biblical homology, two senses of confession are found: confes- sion of human guilt and of praises to God.10 These two forms, which imply faith in God, are repeatedly found in the Psalms of the Old Testa- ment. The most commonly used Septuagint equivalent of o9mologei=n is its derivative, e0comologe/w. The LXX translates the Hebrew ydh —which car- ries both senses of confession—into e0comologe/w. Hence, biblical uses of confession reveal that the task of confessing entails not only giving intel- lectual assent, but also giving genuine consent and commitment from the confessor. In the New Testament, the many nuances of o9mologei=n are tied to the church’s confession and proclamation of faith in Jesus Christ. Specifically, the New Testament shows that confessing faith in Jesus Christ at the time of baptism was essential to demonstrating commit- ment to him, especially during persecution. To confess faith in Jesus Christ was to submit to the authority of Christ. Post-apostolic writings reveal that confession became more concretely tied to its legal roots, thus making it a duty of the Christian. Two forms of public confession developed: one for confessing faith during baptism and worship and another for confessing sin, especially of apostasy. It should be noted that among the various elements that have shaped the early church’s confes- sions, the most influential one was persecution. Furthermore, not only were confessions offered orally, but also they were written down, making them indispensable to the vitality of the early church. Over time, the written form of confessions developed into authoritative or codified creeds to be used as a test or standard of orthodoxy. By Augustine’s time, the church was already using written confes- sions as part of authoritative codes or creeds. Augustine’s Confessions, however, was not written during persecution. Historically, by Emperor Theodosius’s reign, Christianity was established as the official state reli- gion for all practical purpose.11 Despite the lack of external persecution, however, the West was undergoing “profound cultural changes” when 8. See Otto Michel’s word study in Gerhard Kittel, ed., Theological Diction- ary of the New Testament, s.v. “o9mologe/w ktl.” 9. Brown, Augustine, 175. See also O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions, 2:5. 10. Michel, “o9mologe/w ktl,” TDNT 5:207-216. 11. Weintraub, Autobiography, 20. Julian the Apostate failed in his attempt to create a counter-religious culture to Christianity in Roman Empire and the altar of Victory from the Roman senate chamber was discarded at the demand of Bishop Ambrose to Emperor Valentinian II. The Grace of Life in Augustine’s Confessions 43 Augustine penned the Confessions (ca. 397–400).12 As Christianity was settling into the Roman world, it was reshaping or modifying the ethos of the classical world. The source of struggle or temptation during this period was not necessarily from the external—that is, apostasy “by lit- eral trial at the hands of the Roman magistracy”—but took on “the form of an inner trial—whether of Donatists and Pelagians within the body of the church, or of personal sins and doubts within the hearts and minds of individual believers.”13 What, then, was the occasion or purpose of Augustine’s Confessions? Augustine states that he wrote the Confessions to give an account of his life before God and others for the purpose of praising, loving, and thank- ing God and to edify others (1.1.1; 5.1.1; 10.1.1–10.6.6).14 A renowned Augustine scholar, Henry Chadwick, asserts that “no [other] work by Augustine reveals more about his understanding of the high calling of the priesthood” than the Confessions.15 Writing his book as a new bishop of Hippo, as a man “who had come to regard his past as a training for his present career,”16 Augustine used the Confessions to communicate enduring theological insights and perspectives on Christian life as a graced journey of faith.17 In addition to the expressed purposes of the Confessions, additional purposes or sub-purposes have been proposed based on the text’s generative capacities. These theories stem not only from the content but also from the complex or intersecting genres employed in the Confessions which heighten the text’s textuality.
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